Mathematical Illiteracy
Saturday, January 18th, 1997Adair Lara is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. In January of 1997 she wrote a piece about math, in which she implied that the study of math was a tortuous, pointless exercise. The column was lighthearted, and left room for a dissenting view, but for me it dredged up ugly high-school memories of the self-righteous pomposity with which the ‘liberal arts’ clique derogated the ‘math rocks’ and ’science rocks’ as some inferior type of creature. There is a general attitude in our culture that to be mathematically illiterate is not only acceptable, but perhaps a source of pride — proof that you are a broad and open-minded thinker, not constrained to the ‘linear’ and ‘mechanical’ modes of thought required for mathematical rigor. As you might surmise, I disagree.